Square with Jack

2005-05-19T13:06:00.000-07:00

Square with Jack

Because of the plane Crash which had killed my family, it had been over three years since I’d left my office to act like a real detective on a real case,
But nobody ignores a phone call from Jack Nicholson telling you to get your ass down to the Academy Awards show because some killer has just stolen all the Oscars.
Even if you aren’t sure what Jack means, and this time I wasn’t, you always did what he told you to. Because you could hear that thing in his voice. That crazy urgency. Even when he was talking real quiet. But sometimes real quiet is the most dangerous thing to hear.
Nobody knows exactly what it is about Jack but he’s got some strange mysterious power over all of us who create and make our living in the Great Metaphors of Hollywood. And I believe just like everyone else does that when there’s an earthquake in this town the ground doesn’t move until Jack says shake.
So I left my friend Kenneth the gargoyle, speechless as always though he’d somehow talked me out of jumping the night after the Crash, sitting next to Jose Cuervo on the ledge just outside my eleventh floor office window above the corner of Hollywood and Highland and walked down Hollywood Boulevard to the Kodak Theater.
Which is where the 75th Academy Awards were going to be broadcast from that night.
Or maybe not.
Because the most heinous crime Hollywood had ever imagined had just been committed:
No, it wasn’t that Michael Cimino was making a sequel to Heaven’s Gate.
It was that someone had actually stolen the briefcase containing the envelopes with the names of all the winners of the Oscars.
And the man who had the secret code to the back-up list in the computer was dead.
No one was gonna know who won.
Everyone who had said they were happy just to be nominated was actually gonna have to be happy to just be nominated. So we were about to see some real acting.
Of course none of that mattered to me. I wasn’t about to come out of the thousand day old shell of my life for any case, much less one in which the worst possible thing that could happen is that a star’s make-up might run.
But
Jack had called. And I owed him one.
You see, Jack had done a favor for my Great Uncle Al a long time ago. My Uncle wanted Paul Newman to star in his movie Torn Curtain but he couldn’t get Newman to read the script. Now old Uncle Al happened to meet young Jack over an egg roll at Formosa’s one night and mentioned this to him. Next day Newman calls my Uncle Al and asks for the script.
So my family owed Jack. Which meant, since they were all dead, I owed Jack.
I’d kept him off my back for years by threatening to remind everyone that his only "written by" credit was Head starring the Monkees. And it’s hard to deny Mary Jane didn’t help you write it when you call your three main characters Lord High ‘n Low, Inspector Shrink, and The Swami.
But now Jack said he no longer cared if I introduced him by saying "this is the writer who gave you Head".
Now Jack’s a funny guy. But you don’t want to owe him a favor past the time when he wants it returned. Cause once he loses his sense of humor about it he starts raising those haunted eyebrows at you and flocks of birds start flying away and kids start crying and pretty soon you’re getting a real cold feeling deep in the pit of your stomach, like someone just told you your plane’s gonna crash, and all you want to do is get off the damn plane but you can’t because your life is hanging 40,000 feet in the air with nothing holding it up except Jack’s expectation.
So. I kinda wanted to return the favor.
That’s why I stood in the men’s room of the Kodak Theater looking at a dead man.
The dead man was Clarence DeCinces. An accountant for the firm which counted the ballots for the Academy Awards. He had his moment of glory every year when he walked out on stage and told people that, unlike judges in Florida, he knew how to count votes.
But tonight Clarence had run out of moments of glory.
He’d been pushed up and crammed into the back corner of a toilet stall.
And choked to death.
One of the producers of the show, a tall man with very little hair and less patience stood between me and the dead man, speaking sarcastically to a bright blue suited homicide detective:
"They destroyed all the actual ballots and this is the only guy who knows the code to get into the computer to get the back-up list? What kind of idiot would come up with that system?"
Bright Blue nodded at the dead man: "He did."
Hairless wailed: "Christ. I have to talk to Louis. We are so fucked."
His words echoed as he left. "So fucked so fucked so"
Bright Blue turned to me:
"You the guy Jack called?"
"Yeah."
Bright Blue had clear pale blue eyes, very short trimmed hair, a tie-clasped beige tie, and wore his neon blue suit like he was proud of shopping off the rejection rack. The guy was about as humorless as an empty ice cream truck.
He looked me over. I was wearing my usual worn sandals, baggy shorts and a t-shirt.
I think my shirt read "Getting Real Is Just An Illusion".
"Why are you dressed like that?"
"I’m doing a play about homeless people. Musical comedy."
He nodded.
"Thought you were a detective, not an actor."
"I’m undercover. I’m only pretending to do a play about homeless people."
He nodded again.
"Got a name?"
"Yeah. How’re you keeping the press away?"
"We told them we’re shooting a movie so they’re not interested. Funny, huh? We’re in the middle of the place where they hand out awards for shooting movies and nobody cares that we’re shooting a movie."
The guy really knew how to tell a joke.
I asked: "Who’s gonna play you in the movie? Billy Crystal?"
"You know, people do say I look like Billy Crystal."
Muhammad Ali looked more like Billy Crystal than this guy.
I nodded toward the guy standing next to him.
"Who’s he?"
"Robby Cressna. The accounting firm’s guard."
I looked at Robby:
"You were guarding him?" I nodded at the dead man.
"Yeah."
"Looks like you’re out of a job."
He started to smirk then caught himself:
"Yeah. Better get a new one. I need the money."
If I’d been listening I could’ve saved us some time but I was visualizing my half bottle of Jose sitting on a ledge watching the world of Hollywood go by and wondering if I’d recapped it.
Didn’t want rain to water down my night out.
Bright Blue said:
"Robby’s been doing it for three years. Never had any problems before."
I looked Robby over as Bright Blue told me that the guard and Clarence DeCinces had come into the men’s room because, as usual, Clarence felt like he was going to throw up. He was always nervous about going on stage. After a couple minutes Robby decided to wait outside the men’s room. After a few more minutes he came back inside looking for Clarence. Found him dead. Didn’t touch anything. Though there were a lot of men around he didn’t remember seeing anyone acting suspicious except two black guys in leather jackets. Which narrowed the suspect list down to about half of Hollywood and all of Detroit.
Robby was a tough guy with a Ranger tattoo and an earring. Used to be you had to be the toughest of tough guys to wear an earring. Or be out of the closet, and not afraid of tough guys. But now tough guys got closets full of earrings.
Funny how life changes. What was wrong is right. And what was right
Is pretty much determined by history buffs who own the most guns.
Robby’s earring had a familiar letter on it, the flowing B of Bellagio; of course I’m not referring to the paleovenetian and gallo-insubric cultures which were among the first residents of this now palatial peninsula overlooking Lake Como but the watered down Vegasian vacation version, the palace of which has the gallous insubordination to offer you and your palleos free residency as they take all your venal friends for every dollar they got.
But I admired his Players Club earring anyway.
I glanced at him, took my shot:
"Bad luck. Guy rolled box cars."
"Yeah."
He didn’t say "What?". I had to remember that. Which could be hard. I had trouble remembering what time my local Joe’s Liquor store on Lincoln closed.
The door to the theater opened and NOISE poured in.
The noise of people setting up and sitting down and getting up and walking around and testing equipment and equipping tests. The grips and the best boys and the gaffers.
Don’t you just love Hollywood slang? Sounds like a gay wedding.
But it was just a thousand people with a thousand jobs getting ready to put on a show.
And all of ‘em about to lose their jobs unless somebody found a briefcase full of envelopes.
Of course I had walked up to and through that theater to get to this men’s room.
Past the paparazzi, the entertainment press, and the eponymous fans
Who all treated me with complete and utter
Disregard.
Because everybody who was anybody was arriving,
From the pale baleful ghostlike creature Adrian Brody who was dramatically wringing his piano playing hands to the actual frail ghost of Zasu Pitts who had single-handedly turned the wringing of hands into a comedic signature act.
From Clooney to Connery, from Hayek to Hoffman, from Sarandon to Sorvino,
They’d all be passing out awards honoring the fantastic creation of a place called Mordor in Middle Earth and the musical creation of a place called Chicago in Middle America, and they’d be talking about Frodo and Frida, Keanu and Kirk, Frankenheimer and Frankenstein.
Or
If no one found the briefcase
They’d all be standing backstage empty-handed listening to Steve Martin tell a joke about feeling funny because he had a slice of baloney in his shoes.
I watched the musicians who still expected to perform that night warming up, goofing around and checking instruments.
Bono walked aimlessly off the stage down some stairs and into the orchestra pit. With or without you, he was the only guy I knew who somehow became more masculine by wearing pink sunglasses.
Eminem sat on the edge of the stage twisting and snapping his stocking cap at a laughing woman who teased him. Eminem was a good musician, he was just lucky he hadn’t preferred a different kind of candy growing up. Probably would’ve got himself killed on Eight Mile calling himself Skittles.
He was waved over by a drummer and left the laugher alone. She was a petite woman in a loose skirt and a tight white cotton top with dark red hair savagely cut to the nape of her neck.
As I looked closer at her I realized she was looking at me.
She wasn’t laughing now.
No. Not laughing at all. She held my look, then slightly nodded as she flicked her eyes toward the right side of backstage, stood up and disappeared into the shadows of rehearsals.
Without thinking I began walking toward that backstage.
If I was right, she was waiting for me.
If I was wrong, I was just taking a walk backstage.
I stepped around a couple amps, passed two guys with long hair doing sound checks and slipped off to stage right into the gray darkness where make-believe always waited.
I stopped and listened.
All sounds were thirty, forty feet away. Nothing closer.
There was no one there. And then there she was, half hidden by a fold in the scrim curtain.
Our eyes met again. She said:
"You like looking at me?"
"Yes."
She said: "I like your shirt."
"I like yours. You wanna trade?"
She giggled.
If I had been Lancelot and she Vivienne, I would have fallen to one knee and promised to die for her, if only to hear and see her laugh again.
But I was only a fallen detective who was falling for her
And she was not a fair-haired lady of the lake
She was a seductive red head with dangerously dark red hair and black bullet eyes.
Apparently she wondered about our identities too because she asked:
"What band’re you with?"
"Not with a band."
"Then what’re you doing here?"
"It’s a secret."
She took that in, then moved a little closer to me, saying:
"I need to have something happen right now."
I smiled down at her. She wasn’t very tall.
"Okay."
Her black eyes gleamed:
"I’m serious. I need it now."
She half-circled me, shooting black bullets up at me the whole time:
"Right now. I want it. Now."
Somehow I had unleashed the Demon of Immediacy.
I tried to buy myself some time because there was no space between us for sale:
"What exactly do you want?"
"Isn’t it obvious?"
Her lips were dark as licorice, her smell lusty and sweet,
I said:
"Too obvious. You should think about tomorrow."
"Tomorrow’s too far away.
"But now is now."
She kept her lips parted and I kissed her.
Tough to keep saying no when you agree with her.
Up close and in my arms she was not as young as I had first thought.
But not as old as what we were doing.
She wore
A flared light turquoise skirt
No panties
Sandals.
She kicked the sandals off
I kicked mine off
I wore shorts and boxers, they fell off.
She reached for me but saw I was already hard and smiled and moved up close to me
Her arms reached over either of my shoulders
"Help me up."
I put my hands on her waist and lifted as she came up off the floor and gripped the curtains behind me, supporting part of her weight by pulling on the curtains
Then she wrapped her legs around my waist
And hooked her heels behind my back.
I released her waist and slipped my hands under her skirt
Running my fingertips up the back of her thighs to the roundness of her very firm ass
I used one hand to cup her curve
And the other to hold the straight hard rod of me as she slid down, and we combined.
She was moist and ready and willing.
And she was now brother. All now.
She undulated her hips rolling up and down on me
Gripping and squeezing me inside her
Her hands gripping the curtains behind me and over my head
I raked my fingertips up and down her back through the cotton cloth shirt felt the waves of motion and emotion
The arc of her beginning to shudder
She put her head back and moaned "oh god oh god oh god"
Then snapped her head forward and looked down at me and said:
"You got a nice cock baby."
Now unless I can get my tongue on you I’ve never thought of myself as an exceptional lover. But any encouragement makes a man harder and larger
And so I thrust up, onto the balls of my feet
And my balls slammed up against her
And she squealed and squeaked and jerked the curtain
And the walls came tumbling down.
Literally.
The hooks holding the tops of the curtain snapped and a dozen pounds of scrim fell on us
Knocking us off my feet onto the floor of the stage.
As we laughed I pushed the curtain off of her and under us
And I looked down into her eyes and started breathlessly to say
"You are so"
"Don’t talk. Finish me."
Her eyes sparkled black marbles.
I said: "Now. I got it."
So I did.
*****
Turned out her demands were just for immediacy, not for intimacy. She was very easy to satisfy. Got the feeling she was expecting a few more nows in her that night.
As soon as she walked away
I wondered what had happened to her.
The world suddenly seemed a very dark very strange place backstage.
I felt a rumble of thunder and then heard the lightning.
Or maybe it was just a grip moving sheet metal.
I was almost to the front of the stage when I heard the Voice.
"I believe the light that shines on you
"Will shine on you forever..."
The Voice from my past. Three decades of past, full of college dates post college dates and coming up with ideas and just coming to that Voice. I turned back and saw
Paul Simon on stage rehearsing:
"I’m gonna watch you shine
"Gonna watch you grow
"Gonna paint a sign
"So you’ll always know
"As long as one and one is two
"There could never be a father
"Who loved his daughter more than I love you."
My throat swelled up. This son of a bitch of a songwriter always seemed to hit my life with a hammer. This time right in the Adam’s apple.
When I’d left home, which was Detroit, and went off to look for America, the song with the words "Michigan seems like a dream to me now" became my personal anthem.
But what was happening now, the swelling in my throat and the burn of the withheld tears, was exactly why I never left my office anymore. Or my house.
Because now I wanted to sing this song to my daughter.
Two problems.
I couldn’t sing.
And my daughter was dead.
Plane Crash, remember?
But I wanted to believe that the light that was shining on my daughter
Would shine forever
But I didn’t know if that kind of light could go deep enough into the ocean
Because that’s one of two places you could find her.
The other was even an deeper place inside my heart.
I forced myself to walk out of earshot before my Adam’s apple burst from the hard swallowing.
Walked right past Bono coming out of the orchestra pit. Guy was just wandering around. Guess he still hadn’t found what he was looking for.
It was that kind of night.
*****
The producer with almost no hair rushed into the men’s room pulling at the last strands sticking out of his cerebellum:
"Fuck, what are we gonna do? Louis is going nuts! It’s 63 minutes til fuckin’ air time. And we got no names of winners. We can’t go on the air with a bunch of fuckin’ empty envelopes. How’re we gonna know who won?"
I said: "How about nobody wins."
"What do you mean?"
"Nobody can actually win an artistic contest anyway."
"Who the fuck are you?"
"Why don’t you just make up the winners?"
"Why don’t you just fuck off?"
Hairless turned to Bright Blue and asked: "Who the fuck is this guy?"
"Jack asked him to be here."
"Well, fuck him. And fuck Jack too."
Felt the ground begin to quake under our feet.
Hairless had angered the Hollywood gods.
Bright Blue: "What did you say!?"
Hairless: "Fuck. Nothing. Jesus. I must be going out of my fuckin’ mind."
Guy was right. Insulting Jack. No one was going to work with him again.
"What the fuck are we gonna do?"
I was about to tell him to go look up another word for fuck while we moved our base of operations out of a toilet but instead I acted like my cell phone didn’t work and asked Robby:
"Can I borrow your phone?"
He stared at me as everyone stopped talking and listened to me explain:
"I gotta call my vet about my dog - he’s sick. It’s a local call."
As Robby handed me his phone,
Hairless threw up his hands saying sarcastically: "What a fuck-up. We got a billion dollar show we can’t put on and this fuckin’ guy’s worried about his fuckin’ dog."
Okay. I was definitely buying the guy a Slang Thesaurus. But first I wanted to confirm my guess. So I looked up the last number Robby had dialed.
I read the area code:
702.
Bingo. I had guessed right.
But the gambling gets a little more serious than Bingo in area code 702.
You know that’s Vegas, right?
As the Jacquelyn Susann married to James Cain version tells you:
Vegas is a woman who grows like a cactus weed, spreading quicker than comprehension, watered and nurtured to life by outside forces, unnatural in her beauty but beckoning and alluring nonetheless; she looks safe enough but when you try to take anything away from her your hand becomes bloodied by unseen thorns and stung by unforgiving needles. Whether you fucked her or not, and so you just might as well, Vegas is the mistress you always have to pay.
Or you could just say she’s the whore who sucks up all your money.
"Your dog okay?"
I looked up at the voice. Bright Blue had been watching me. I said:
"I don’t own a dog."
I held the phone in my hand and let his clear curious eyes search mine as I said:
"Had two. Lost ‘em both after the plane Crash."
I swallowed the hour old taste of tequila back deeper into my throat and asked:
"I assume you’re looking for the briefcase."
He snorted and shook his head, letting the mockery seep into his voice: "Boy, you are some kind of detective. Yeah, that’s what we’re doing. We’re looking for the briefcase."
"Then send someone to the conductor’s podium. It’s probably right on top. If not, have him check wherever the conductor keeps his score."
He snorted again: "You think Bill Conti did this?"
"I think you should look for the briefcase on his podium."
Bright Blue looked at another detective who’d been taking notes and listening.
The other cop said: "Sammy’s on the stage." He held up a walkie-talkie.
Bright Blue thought, then nodded for him to call. After all, what did they have to lose?
The other cop spoke into the walkie-talkie and then looked back at Bright Blue:
"Sammy’ll check it out."
Bright Blue now turned his full attention on me:
"You want to tell me why we’re wasting our time looking under Bill Conti’s papers for a stolen briefcase?"
"It’ll be on top of his papers if it’s there. And no."
I began punching a number into Robby’s phone.
Bright Blue put his hand over the phone and said:
"Tell me anyway."
I looked up into his pale blue humorless eyes and said quietly:
"His plan only works if the show goes on as scheduled. And the producers need the briefcase for that to happen. And that’s the only accessible place I can think of where you could leave that briefcase and be certain that it’d be found before air time."
"Whose plan?"
I ignored his question, pulled the phone out from under his hand and redialed the Vegas number into Robby’s phone.
Obviously the person on the other end had caller id because a welcoming voice said:
"Hello Robby. What’s the bet?"
I held out the phone for Robby and said:
"It’s for you."
He took the phone and said the most intelligent thing said so far:
"Huh?"
I said: "It’s your bookie."
His eyes widened as he realized what that meant
Then he dropped his phone and bolted for the door and I got out of his way.
I wasn’t a hero.
Hell, I hadn’t been much of a detective for over three years.
And really not all that close to being a human being.
*****
The world was in the middle of a very hard rain as I walked back to my office through Hollywood. I stepped on its stars stuck and gleaming in its cement sidewalks, read the shining letters of its name perched up high on the mountain, and saw its lights reflected in the water rushing down its street into the gutters.
Hollywood would never be cleaner.
Hell of a place to give birth to ideas.
No wonder so few of them survived.
Uncle Al was nominated for Best Director five times. Never won. But you can’t take a movie class today without learning about him. So the Academy denying him is almost as bad as the music industry never giving the Beatles a Grammy. It’s all about the Favor. And even though McCartney’s become the real Pop of pop music I don’t think you can say you understand the last fifty years unless you can quote "Lucy In the Sky with Diamonds" with a straight face.
The cops found the briefcase on the conductor’s podium.
Just like I thought they would.
Because seeing Robby’s Bellagio earring made me think:
This player bets a lot of money.
Which means this guy owes a lot of money.
Because no one ever wins. Ever.
And what if he owes a lot of money now.
And I knew all about the power of now from the Demon of Immediacy.
So he needs a sure bet to pay it off. And a bet doesn’t get any surer than knowing the winners of a contest before the winners are announced.
So what happens next you might ask. Or maybe you don’t. Anyway:
Clarence refuses to tell Robby the names of the winners or to open the briefcase.
Robby chokes him - out of anger or frustration or maybe it’s just an accident because he’s reliving part of his Ranger training - who knows? But he chokes him - okay?
But he can’t call Vegas from the men’s room because people will hear the echoes.
So he locks dear old dead Clarence in the toilet stall, takes the briefcase with him, and makes the call to Vegas to place his bets from outside the men’s room.
However, when he returns to the men’s room, there’s too many men in the men’s room. He can’t slip back under the stall and return the briefcase. But, in order for his plan to work, they must announce the winners tonight. He needs to leave the briefcase in a place where someone will definitely find it before air time. Then, with musicians milling about, inspiration hits him: He asks himself: how does every Academy Award show start?
His answer:
Music, maestro, please.
He puts the briefcase on the conductor’s podium.
Then he returns to the men’s room and pretends to discover the body.
I got all that from a joke, an earring, and a dice roll metaphor. Pretty good, huh?
That’s why I believe in the sense of humor, don’t wear jewelry, and reread Keats.
I don’t remember who won the Oscars that night but they don’t owe me a dime or even a thank you because I was square with Jack, and that’s all that mattered.
That’s all that ever matters in this town.
But then I had this terrifying realization:
Jack had made me come out of my office.
He’d interrupted my drinking, and my forgetting.
After three years, he’d brought me back into the real world. If such a thing exists.
And you know what that means:
I still owed him one.

The End

Funny Thing About Murder

2005-04-22T14:54:00.000-07:00

An introductory essay to a series of comic mysteries I have written:

"Funny Thing About Murder"

First off: I am not saying there is anything funny about murder. Not in real life. I think of families who have been tragically touched by this crime and I cannot imagine what they feel about such stories. Such death, pain, grief, loss, are all very real to me and respected. My work is not meant to reflect in any way a family’s real experience. I try to make my characters emotions authentic and in that sense real because I want to play out some kind of genuine interaction between the people I have created, but in the end these are just stories.

I choose to write mystery stories because I think they are entertaining, just as Chandler, Tey, and Christie did. Greene even called his mystery-type books "entertainments". However, I have added a new element, a constant sense of humor, to the stories. I’ve done this because I think inserting comedy makes mystery stories even more fun to read.

I also believe that it reveals our hero the detective in a very new way and shows his vulnerability. It takes guts to put your sense of humor on the line; not everyone is laughing with you, and some are not laughing at all. This vulnerability is separate and apart from the case at hand in which he must not appear as a jokester but rather as a smart strong clever hero who will solve the crime.

Oh well. He doesn’t always solve the crime because he’s messing about but of course to get the reader to accept the legitimacy of his critical and humorous attitudes, the hero must also make fun of himself.

Makes me ask: what makes a hero a hero?
Perspective.
He knows a bigger picture. He acts on a bigger stage. Hell, he’s writing the story.
His self-awareness becomes our self-awareness. He leads us to fame, fortune, or disaster.
He says things and thinks things, and makes comparisons and connections which we would not normally, or perhaps not even abnormally, make. He forces us to look at old things anew, and new things with a wider and more critical vision. And don’t forget to laugh.

But, in the end, he is supposed to find out the truth.
Trouble is, these are comedies. And you know what happens to the truth in comedies:
It gets a little twisted.
In fact, the first case is called
Sense of Humor.
In which a woman hires our detective to find hers, which has been stolen. Yeah. Stolen.

[Eleven cases have been written. One by one they will appear in this space.]

comic mystery

Square with Jack

Funny Thing About Murder